Regrets
by starry-eyes184
Summary: He nearly floors it by mistake when the voice from the back of his mind manages to push into its forefront, surprising him enough to make Freddie twitch all over. It’s clear and high pitched, with a sweet little lisp on the s. This song is Katie Fitch.


Disclaimer: I seem to have forgotten these lately. So, as a blanket statement over my last few fics: Obviously I'm not brilliant and do not own anything you recognize.

A/N: Never really meant to post this, but I'm feeling frustrated and stuck on a Panda/JJ fic I'm attempting, so here's this to make me feel better. PLEASE, PLEASE, I BEG OF YOU, REVIEW. I only beg because I know F/K isn't the most popular pairing out there (coughEmsNaomicough) but still, I worked pretty hard on this, and I'd love feedback. Oh, also, look out for something Katie says being similar to something Ems says in the show. More on that at the end. Happy reading!

_Regrets_

* * *

Its 2:21 a.m. on a Thursday when Freddie's big sister calls him up, crying, begging for a ride and well past wasted. There was a fight involving money or drugs or sex or something with her boyfriend-slash-manager and now she's crying in a corner and he's taken off with the car. She asks him to pick her up, to just this once (again) come to her rescue. He sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose, then argues with Karen for a few minutes until he gives up the fight he knew she'd win and asks where she is. She tells him she's at some pub an hour away from his university and Freddie rolls out of bed like the nice guy he's supposed to be and throws on a sweatshirt.

Freddie gets in to his car and starts the engine, lighting up a cigarette and cursing his inability to say no to his family. To tell them to fuck off and clean up their own mess. But then he thinks about his sister dressed up in one of her slutty club singing outfits surrounded by all the drunken assholes who spend their nights sucking back pints until they haven't got enough self control to keep from leering at pretty girls. Guys like his best friend, who's got a heart underneath his drunken haze, but no great moral compass. It makes him shift the car into drive and press down on the gas pedal, a little too forcefully.

Thinking of Cook makes him think of Effy, because the three of them, they've always been a triangle. Even when Effy was through with Cook. Even when she was through with _him_. The three of them would always be a mix up of sex and love and jealousy. It didn't work out with Effy for more than six months until they were both realizing Freddie couldn't fucking fix her problems at home and Effy couldn't live up to the fucking pedestal he'd put her on. He hated himself a little bit for those six months, those months that he spent pretending to be one half of the most perfect, the most beautiful couple in Bristol because everyone had watched them both fucking lusting for each other under their half-hidden stares. They'd broken people with those stares.

With a sigh, Freddie flicks his second cigarette out the window and slows the car at the stoplight. There's no one else out tonight, because it's a Thursday and nearly three in the morning, and some people (like him) have better things to be doing (like sleeping) than driving out to a pub called The Pig Pen to pick up their bitching older sisters. To compensate for the lack of company and the lack of noise, Freddie turns the dial on his radio and lets the sound fill the void. He changes the station, flipping back and forth looking for something not news, not boring, not total rubbish, but he stops when the light changes to green and leaves it. It's landed on some girly pop station but Freddie doesn't care enough to change it again, and just presses more insistently on the pedal, speeding up well beyond the limit.

The song sounds strangely familiar, and before he knows it, Freddie's mentally singing along, predicting each beat and each verse. The third chorus has gone by before Freddie starts trying to remember where he's heard it before, and how it's gotten so ingrained in his mind. The song is bouncy and ridiculously meaningless, just a bunch of words strung together with a melody, and not at all the type of music he listens to normally. For some reason Freddie thinks of tequila, strong and going down his throat in a tipsy haze, but he still can't place the song.

_"Turn it up, babe, I love this song!"_

He nearly floors it by mistake when the voice from the back of his mind manages to push into its forefront, surprising him enough to make Freddie twitch all over. It's clear and high pitched, with a sweet little lisp on the _s_. This song is Katie Fitch. Freddie shifts in his driver's seat, feeling stiff from nearly forty five minutes of driving time and gets the car back to an appropriate speed. The song has changed once he's resettled himself, but now it's playing on repeat in his mind, back in his bedroom at home, four years ago. He's sixteen and Katie Fitch is his girlfriend (for the moment) and she's snuck into his room after one with a bottle of tequila hidden under her coat.

_"Nicked it from the personal collection of Rob and Jenna Fitch," she says with that tittery laugh, and holds it out to him._

Freddie hates to think of Katie. It's his own damn fault, because Katie should be a pleasant memory of a great girl who he was lucky enough to have for a while, but he went and screwed it all up by messing her around while fucking staring after Effy with those blinders he had. Katie is regret, she's lost chances, she's a reminder of how much of a total bastard he was when he was sixteen and (thought he was) in love for the first time. That night four years ago, Katie climbed in his bed and laid her head on his shoulder. They drank stolen tequila (all the more satisfying) in the dark and listened to that fucking pop song until Katie looked up at him with those big dark eyes and asked him if he wanted her.

He thought it was a dumb question at the time, because when it was just the two of them alone in the dark with their feelings, of course he fucking wanted her, she was gorgeous and he was a sixteen year old guy. But now, four years after, four years after he fucked Effy after she cracked his girlfriend's head open with a rock, he wonders if he should have said something else, if he had told her the truth, maybe things might have worked out differently. Maybe Katie wouldn't be painful to think about; maybe she wouldn't look at him like he was something that crawled out of a cesspool. That night, the night with the song, when he was all hazy and she was looking up at him with those dark eyes, he first saw Katie naked. Not just without her clothes- which, wow, what a gorgeous girl- but without her carefully spun safety net. Without those fucking walls she worked so hard to build around everything she thought, felt, was afraid of.

_"Freddie, do you want me? Do you want me back?" she whispered into his shoulder. He felt the vibrations from her soft mouth and it made him shiver. Her eyes were big and wide and open, and she looked really small and unsure in that moment._

_"I want you Katie. Yes." When he answered, she smiled back in the dark, and he tangled his fingers in the smooth red hair lying across his pillow. Katie put her hand on his chest, right over his heart, and her eyes filled up with something that looked like hope. She closed her eyes and he leaned when she did, their mouths meeting in a deep kiss. He kissed back, increasing the fervor and rolling so he was lying over top of her. Katie pushed her tongue passed his lips and shifted her legs so they were on either side of his hips. She tasted like alcohol and smelled sweet like a lily. He pulled away to look at her. Her hair was mussed and her eyes shone in the dark, high on whatever feelings were running between them. And there it was, Katie Fitch, without her walls, looking radiant even in the dark._

He feels guilty for being able to remember it. Like he's taken a picture of the person inside without permission, and tacked it on the wall of his memory to look at whenever he pleases. Freddie didn't doubt for a second that if she'd had the chance, Katie would have stolen it back, and hid it away somewhere where no one but her could see. Still, he's glad he's got it, that this song has brought it forward, because it reminds him how much they'd had together in the short time they'd been together. Now he wishes he'd made more of it, that he'd known a good thing while he'd had it, and did more to hang on to Katie.

Freddie pulls into the parking lot of The Pig Pen, feeling even more tired than he would any other Thursday at 3:35 in the morning after an hour in the car. He gets out, locks the door, and prepares himself to be the hero again, to pull his sister out of the pub and drive her back to his dorm to sleep on the floor until she's got a ride home. When he goes through the door, he finds the place mostly empty by then, but his sister is there, not cowering in the corner like anyone would expect, but sidled up next to the barman with her flirty face on, running her hand up and down the stem of her cocktail glass.

"Karen, let's go," Freddie says, grabbing onto her arm.

"Will you excuse me, for just a second, I'll be right back," Karen says, all smiles, to the man behind the counter. She wrenches her arm out of Freddie's grasp and turns around. "I'm not ready to go yet, little brother, now if you could just go bugger off for another ten minutes, I might be able to get this guy to take me home."

Freddie screws up his face in anger, because wow, fucking hell, did he just spend an hour in the car for nothing? Does she not get that he'd been sleeping when she called, that he had class at nine the next morning? "Karen, we're leaving, I don't give a fuck if you're trying to get yourself another STD, I'm not waiting around until closing so you can make sure you've got a back up ride if this guy doesn't want to take you home to screw."

The argument escalates until Karen finally storms off and Freddie waits for her to use the toilets and get her bag. He sits at her stool and finishes off the last of her drink in one swallow, watching the bar tender serving the last round of customers. He looks up automatically when he hears a female voice asking for a shot of tequila, and watches when the barman readies the alcohol, setting the shot glass on the sticky brown countertop in front of a girl four stools to his left. She's alone, and turned away from him. He can see she's got brilliantly red hair that shines in the low lighting of the pub, and Freddie's heart leaps to his throat, because if this is really happening, then he's pretty sure fate or karma or God or something has just dealt him a lucky hand.

He gets off the stool, and watches the girl tap her high heeled shoes on the pub floor in time with the song playing, and pat her hands on her hip at the same time. The girl is short, and wearing a cheetah print dress in blue and Freddie's just about ready to lose his head because he's so nervous- _anxious_- _excited_ to see Katie Fitch in a pub at three in the morning, all by total fortunate accident. She's swaying now, and grabs her shot, downing it quickly. In that moment, for a second, Emily Fitch is there too, in the back of Freddie's mind, giving him the same look she did the day back at the dress shop before the sweetheart dance, like he's not supposed to be this stupid. The ghost of Emily Fitch hangs on his shoulder, pulling him back, reminding him that her sister hates him, that he should know better, that Katie's gotten over him. The Emily in his head is pulling on his arm, trying to stop him from opening her sister up to a new chance at hurting, but he brushes off the image and carries on by tapping Katie on the shoulder.

When she turns around, he freezes up all over, inside and out. There's just shock there, because oh, of course not, why on earth would Katie Fitch ever be alone in a greasy place like this called The Pig Pen doing tequila shots and waiting for Freddie to show up in her life again? He remembers then that Katie's got darker hair now, more natural and longer, that she's going to university a few hours away from here, and that she's probably laying in her own bed with some other guy, showing him the real her in the dark. He apologizes to this girl that looks nothing like Katie from the front, has none of her confidence or that inherent sweetness that hides in the corners of her smile even when she's being a total bitch and tearing people down like they're nothing. He asks her the time, even though he already knows it (its 3:53) and slowly walks back over to Karen's stool, stiffly sitting down.

"There you are, Freddie, come on, let's get out of this fucking shitty bar," Karen says, appearing next to him.

"Hold on, one second," he insists, and flags down the bar tender. "I'll have a shot of tequila, please."

* * *

A/N: Hm, not as pleased with this one as the last, I liked writing Katie because it was much easier than Freddie, who is insanely boring without Katie. OH! Right, the whole thing about being "wanted" sounded kind of similar to Emily's oft-quoted line in ep six, but that was not intentional. However, I decided not to change it because I am lazy, and also they're twins. So, they think the same way at least sometimes right? Right? Okay, probably not, but anyway. PLEASE REVIEW. Thanks for reading!


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